What a threshold

Parts of India routinely get ridiculously hot.  The news today:

NEW DELHI: Heatwave conditions intensified in most of the northern states of India on Monday, with Churu in Rajasthan scorching at 47.5 degrees Celsius and the mercury breaching the 46-degree mark in parts of the national capital.

And look at the rather extraordinarily high threshold they seem to set there for calling it a heatwave:

In England, by comparison, you get the impression it's something like two days above 28 degrees.

I would still like to know what happens to the death rate in India during its heat waves.  I mean, surely it must increase substantially, but you never hear about this.  (Unlike when you have a heat wave in Europe or Russia.)

Update:  yes, there is research about this, and I think I might have even linked to this paper before.  But the numbers cited for increased deaths always sound too low to me.

Another nice sounding, almost vegan, recipe

I get so surprised when I see a vegan-ish recipe that I think would taste good, I like to record it here.  (I think the last one I noted was from the Washington Post too, and I still haven't cooked it).

Anyway, here it is - a curried chickpea salad.   It contains a lot of things I like.

Being a perpetually outraged loudmouth for a living means never having to be consistent

Moat swimming popular in Japan

A Japanese man was arrested in Tokyo on Monday after swimming across the Imperial Palace's moat to scale an outer wall, entering off-limits parts of the grounds, police said.

They said the man appeared to be in his 40s and was arrested mid-morning after emerging on palace grounds shortly before Emperor Naruhito was scheduled to conduct a rice planting ceremony elsewhere on the imperial property.

The report goes on to note the recent history of other men who have swum across the moat.    

In America, I suspect they would die in a hail of gun fire.

Don't tell your paranoid friend...

A paper that has recently appeared in Science Advances doesn't seem to yet have had the publicity in the media that I thought it might get:

Remote, brain region–specific control of choice behavior with ultrasonic waves

The abstract:

The ability to modulate neural activity in specific brain circuits remotely and systematically could revolutionize studies of brain function and treatments of brain disorders. Sound waves of high frequencies (ultrasound) have shown promise in this respect, combining the ability to modulate neuronal activity with sharp spatial focus. Here, we show that the approach can have potent effects on choice behavior. Brief, low-intensity ultrasound pulses delivered noninvasively into specific brain regions of macaque monkeys influenced their decisions regarding which target to choose. The effects were substantial, leading to around a 2:1 bias in choices compared to the default balanced proportion. The effect presence and polarity was controlled by the specific target region. These results represent a critical step towards the ability to influence choice behavior noninvasively, enabling systematic investigations and treatments of brain circuits underlying disorders of choice.

Brit Hume is a lost cause

I think he used to have a reputation as one of Fox News's moderates.  Now he's just a Trump defending moron:

Sinclair Davidson's moderation skills on display again

Sure, Clementine Ford is an annoying version of a feminist who thinks she can joke about men not dying fast enough while (presumably) being upset about men (like Alan Jones) making violence suggestive language about women. 

Personally, I have long thought she is best ignored, but it's fair enough that people complain about her getting grants to continue doing whatever she does. 

So, of course, the quality of Catallaxy comments about her is going to be great (that's sarcasm), and include argument over whether she is attractive or not.  Because that matters in a debate about what she said.  This comment struck me as particularly unpleasant, though:

Why has no journalist in the country ever challenged this academic for what he allows and doesn't allow at a blog he can moderate? 

Miranda Devine - expert on black America

What lulz.  Miranda Devine turns up in the New York Post, saying that Biden has lost blacks because of his "you ain't black" statement last week:

“Ain’t black” is Biden’s “deplorables” moment. Yet his supporters seem oblivious to the lethal blow it has delivered to his prospects, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t comprehend the catastrophe of her “basket of deplorables” insult to half of America in 2016.

Biden confirmed what Candace Owens’ “Blexit” movement is all about, the exit by black Americans from a Democratic Party that takes their vote for granted and traps them in a victim narrative.

Candace Owens!  The last time I clicked on something by her, a couple of weeks ago (via Twitter) she was arguing that people shouldn't get so hung up (pardon the pun) on the history of American lynchings.  There were "only" 3,500 blacks lynched over the entire American history, so yeah, it was bad, but let's not get carried away about its significance.  (I paraphrase ever so slightly.)

A sad story about the movie business

Of course, this would have happened thousands of time before, but it's still sad reading about how a guy who, at the age of 62, finally sold a script for a movie, but had the idea taken over by someone famous, who then made dubious claims about the lack of influence of the original work.

The quasi villain is Richard Curtis, who I personally would have liked to see retire from creative writing 30 years ago.  (I think that allows for his TV work, but kills off all of his movies - especially Love Actually.)

A close examination of COVID-19 spread

Interesting story at Science, about how a South African hospital was able to do a very careful trace of how COVID-19 spread through it:

On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time.

Now, scientists at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have published a detailed reconstruction of how the virus spread from ward to ward and between patients, doctors, and nurses, based on floor maps of the hospital, analyses of staff and patient movements, and viral genomes. Their 37-page analysis, posted on the university’s website on 22 May, is the most extensive study of any hospital outbreak of COVID-19 so far. It suggests all of the cases originated from a single introduction, and that patients rarely infected other patients. Instead, the virus was mostly carried around the hospital by staff and on the surfaces of medical equipment.....

The report, which reads like a detective novel, tracks the virus’s spread through five hospital wards, including neurology, surgery, and intensive care units (ICUs), as well as to a nearby nursing home and dialysis center. Remarkably, no staff infections seem to have taken place in the hospital’s COVID-19 ICU, arguably the riskiest area of the hospital. That may be because patients are less infectious by the time they are admitted to intensive care, or because staff there are more diligent about preventing infection, the authors note.

The first patient, who sought help for coronavirus symptoms, only spent a few hours at the hospital, but likely transmitted the virus to an elderly patient admitted the same day for a stroke. The pair were in the hospital’s emergency department at the same time; the first patient was kept separate in a triage area, but that room was reached through the main resuscitation bay, where the stroke patient occupied a bed. (The emergency department was closed in April and opened again this month with an altered layout to improve infection control.) The two were also seen by the same medical officer.

The stroke patient, who developed a fever on 13 March, probably infected the first staff case, a nurse caring for her who developed symptoms on 17 March. A further four patients may have caught the virus from the stroke patient, including a 46-year-old woman admitted for severe asthma who had a bed opposite hers. Both she and the stroke patient died.

But on the whole, patients infected few other patients directly. Instead staff members spread the disease from patient to patient and from department to department—perhaps sometimes without becoming infected themselves. “We think in the main it’s likely to have been from [staff] hands and shared patient care items like thermometers, blood pressure cuffs, and stethoscopes,” says Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform and one of the study leaders. He and the other authors found no evidence that aerosol transmission contributed to the outbreak.

 There is more at the link above.

COVID-19 problems in India

I can't embed this, but there's a short video report on CNA about how the Right wing in India is using COVID-19 to spread ill will towards Muslims.   (Apparently, social media is being used to spread claims such as one that Muslims are spitting on food they sell so as to ensure the spread of the virus.) 

Once again, as example of the way social media can be a dangerous menace.

Word salad of the day

Stan Grant got to write a real word salady piece for The Conversation about the Uluru statement (regarding aboriginal representation in parliament or otherwise), and I am pleased to see that lots of comments are along the lines of this first one:

The problem I, and I believe many Australians have, with articles like this is that it is a word salad of vague concepts and ideas with precisely zero clear policy change proposals. As a normal working bloke who didn’t go to Uni I can honestly say I have no idea what a single part of this article means in the real world.

A voice to parliament? To say what? If you read this article out in parliament you’d put everyone to sleep.

Stan Grant is ponderous in a very Paul Kelly fashion.  So many words to so little effect.

Quick movie review - Jojo Rabbit

Watched it on Saturday.

It often made me laugh, but I can see why it had a limited box office take.  The tone changes are way, way too abrupt. There is one way I thought the film could go some way to redeem that - but it is sort of a spoiler so I will put it below in small print.*

Other than that, the film often looked a lot like a Wes Anderson one, and I see lots of critics noticed that in their reviews.  (I actually read little about this film before seeing it.)   That's not a bad thing, it's just an observation.

I think Taiki Waititi is very talented, and obviously likes to mix up humour with a bit of pathos or sentimentality (even What We Do in the Shadows had romance in it.)    But the broader the satire, the harder it is to pull that off satisfactorily, and a lot of this is pretty broad satire.  So the sudden switches to bleak seriousness are pretty disorientating.

Overall, nice try, well made and well acted.   But not a complete success.

PS:  I think the film shows how we often undervalue the great job that can be done by child actors.  The lead kid in this was really good, in a challenging role.  Yet we never seem to see kids seriously considered for acting awards.  I wonder why...


*  I thought it would have been a nice touch if the father had turned up at the end.  No such luck.

Fear of not social distancing

As I am sure others may have noticed, I get the impression that, at least as far as supermarkets are concerned, a lot of shoppers are no longer taking social distancing all that seriously.

I am finding that I now get the feeling, when people push past close to me with no obvious concern, that I am passing through the invisible cloud of their exhaled breath, containing God knows what.   The whole of a busy supermarket now feels like it could be an invisible viral soup.

Of course, what I should be doing is wearing a facemask to help counter this feeling of helplessness in the face of my fellow careless humans.  But I took a punt and didn't put one on today, and regretted it.

I wonder how many other people have developed this mild form of germophobia...

    

Obviously, yes

The Guardian, dealing with the important stories of the moment:

The Empire Strikes Back at 40: did the Star Wars saga peak too early?

The article notes what many seem to forget:  the movie did not open with uniformly great reviews.  But this helped boost the pleasure when I saw it, as it was one of those movies which I went into with no great expectations, and was delighted at how great it was.   (That also made The Return of the Jedi, which I seem to recall getting better reviews than it deserved, suffer a great deal in comparison.)

Friday porn

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If you think the Tara Read allegation has legs...

...I suggest you watch last night's Planet America, in which they uncover evidence that she (or someone acting for her) went back and amended an on line statement to make it foreshadow more details coming, when in fact it originally referred only to sexual harassment, not sexual assault.

This and the recent Politico story about how many people she has dealt who think she has a loose association with the truth, convince me that she is an oddball who has upped a story of leaving Biden's office for harassment (which the other office workers say was not the reason for her departure) into one of serious sexual assault.  

Planet America continues to be extremely good - very informed, and very balanced.  I would fault them for too much balance in favour of Trump and Republicans, actually;  but they are still well worth watching.

Putin's not having a good pandemic

Politico has an article that notes:

For most of the spring, the official line from state media was that Russia had nothing to worry about. The coronavirus was happening somewhere else, in Europe and Asia and the United States, but not here in Russia. The country had reacted promptly to potential danger, closing the border with China on January 30, then screening incoming passengers and finally halting all incoming air traffic to keep the invading viral army out. Hospitals were refitted, doctors retrained, and protective gear and equipment sent to every hospital in the country. No problem, said the Kremlin: We’ve got this.

That’s no longer believable. As of Monday, May 18, Russia was in second place after the United States in number of infections — 290,678. And those are just the official statistics. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said he believes about 2 percent of the population of Moscow is infected — that is, about 250,000 people. The death rate remains low, with only 2,722 deaths so far, although there are doubts about that number too: Recent media reports have shown how Russian methodology for assigning cause of death has lowered the Covid morbidity numbers, perhaps by more than 50 percent. (This was disputed by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova.) I don’t know anyone who thinks the statistics are accurate, if only because people were dying from Covid in Russia before anyone was testing for it.

This was supposed to be a triumphant spring for Putin. Under his stewardship, the country had amassed a huge reserve fund, had confidently started a price war with Saudi Arabia over oil and was arranging a spectacular international event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was planned to be a lavish celebration, where hundreds of foreign leaders and dignitaries, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and possibly Donald Trump would stand on the viewing platform above Lenin’s mausoleum and watch a military parade. Millions would march in “Immortal Regiment” parades, honoring relatives who fought in the war; the day would end with banquets, grand concerts and the best fireworks display of the decade. 

Putin had also carefully laid the groundwork for a series of political and constitutional moves that would allow him, effectively, to remain in power for the foreseeable future, maybe even for life. In March, the Russian Parliament approved an amendment to the constitution that would limit presidential terms but would also reset Putin’s presidential terms to zero, paving the way for him to stay head of state until 2036, the year he will turn 84. All that remained to seal the deal was a general vote on the constitutional amendments, which was supposed to be held in April.

 And in the Washington Post:

Stories of Russia’s powerful state capacity have long been central to Putin’s image as a strong leader. Since he first became president in 2000, Putin has promised to provide decisive individual leadership, not constrained by parliament, media, oligarchs or civil society, and to rebuild the Russian state, which had crumbled in the 1990s. At the beginning of his reign, Putin implicitly asked Russian citizens to accept a social pact. He would rebuild the state and grow the economy if Russians would agree to forgo their democratic institutions and human rights and allow him greater power. Putin also promised to return Russia to the international stage as a “great power.” The image of Putin as a strong leader and Russia as a strong state — both at home and abroad — has played a key role in Putin’s mystique. Putin is a “statist.” There is even a precise word in the Russian language for this ideological orientation: gosudarstvennik.

And that’s why Russia’s recent travails with containing the coronavirus threaten Putin and his autocracy. Globally, Russia now is second only to the United States in the number of citizens infected, and many suspect underreporting, especially regarding mortality rates, in official statistics.

The reality is that Putin has failed to build an efficient state in the service of Russian people over the past 20 years. He has put tremendous resources into modernizing Russia’s nuclear weapons, intelligence capabilities, conventional and police forces, and Olympic facilities, but invested far less into roads, schools or hospitals, especially outside of Moscow. Covid-19 is now exposing these lapses in state-building.

Putin also personally has not stepped forward during this crisis. He has been absent for days at a time, deferring to governors to make their own decisions. He has seemed disengaged and sometimes even uninterested in leading his government’s response to the pandemic. Moreover, Russia’s minister of culture and minister of housing have both tested positive, while Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin have even been hospitalized. That doesn’t look like strength.

Unusual drug effects

I have likely posted before about the drug DMT*, and how odd I find it that the very common effect of it is for users to have a "visit" from a entity perceived variously as an alien, spirit, god, angel, or something.   This means its users are inclined to believe more in the supernatural.  Vice has an article about a recent study:

A study has found that most people who regularly use the psychedelic drug DMT develop beliefs in a higher power such as God, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins University.

An online survey of more than 2,500 people undertaken by researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine revealed that after taking DMT—nicknamed “the spirit molecule” for its ability to create deeply spiritual experiences—58 percent of respondents said tripping on DMT had triggered a belief in divine beings and powerful supernatural entities.

The study, published in the new issue of Journal of Psychopharmacology, aimed to better understand the weird experiences people have on DMT—called “entity encounter experiences”—and how they impacted their outlook. The survey was shared globally on websites such as VICE and is the largest questionnaire looking at DMT entity encounters to date. The results were published by some of the pioneers in modern psychedelic research: Alan K. Davis, Roland Griffiths, and Matthew Johnson, who run Hopkins’ new Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Respondents to the study, who had taken DMT on average 14 times, described bumping into an array of what they could best describe as aliens, spirits, angels, demons, gnomes and fairies. Most of these creatures, said respondents, were sentient and benevolent, with many described as “sacred.” Less than 15 percent reported “judgmental or malicious” creatures.

Now this may sound as if you have a good chance of enjoying the experience, but I'm not sure I would want to hear one of the messages noted here:

Almost 70 percent of people said they received some kind of message, task or insight from the entities they rubbed elbows with. Some were given predictions about the future or told the day they would die. Some were shown a way out of addiction. Others were told “love is the answer to everything" or “we are all connected, all one.” Some were even told they are God.

I don't want some bogus angel or alien worrying me about the date of my death.

The other thing I found surprising about this is how short the DMT trip is how chronologically short they can be:

Whatever, or whoever, people are meeting in the DMT zone, these life changing appointments, described by psychedelic ethnobotanist Terence McKenna as “machine elves from hyperspace”, are very short in real time. While a smoked DMT experience can feel like many lifetimes, curiously, the effects leave as quickly as they come, peaking in just a few minutes and evaporating in less than half an hour. For comparison, an LSD trip can last 12 hours or more.

All pretty interesting, even for someone like me who has never had an inclination to try anything more than alcohol.


*  Yes, I have, in 2011. 

Not feeling good about India

In an online article about Buddhism and free will (which I do not entirely "grok", and quite possibly never will!), I found this passage interesting:

Hindu scripture describes the saints as veritable supermen. For example, the Taittiriya Upanishad tells us that the yogi "attains . . . independent sovereignty,” and enjoys a bliss that is a billion times grea­ter than that of the highest gods (1.6; 2.8.).  In the Mait­ri Upanishad the ascetic surpasses Brahman, the Godhead, and "will go [yet further], he [will surpass] the gods in the realm of divinity. . . ." (4.4) In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad yogis gain in­credible pow­ers: they “shall roll up space as if it were a piece of leather" (6.20); and a yogi in the Taittiriya Upanishad boasts that "I am the first-born of the world-order, earlier than the gods, in the navel of immortality. . . . I have over­come the whole world" (3.5).  Such a view has been called “spiritual Titanism,” an extreme form of humanism in which humans take on divine attributes and prerogatives.5

 
            In the Pali texts the Buddha rejects these incredible claims of the Hindu and Jain yogis.  He was particularly critical of their claims to omniscience. 

Well, yes.  Almost certainly a good idea to reject anyone's claim, be they yogi or not, to omniscience.

This leads me to something I have been thinking about lately - I'm still slowly making my way through the Indian Netflix series Sacred Games, and the second series in particular is making a case for considering Indian mythology to be much, well, weirder than I had previously thought.   The show also seems to spending a lot of time on deriding the country's cult of the guru. 

Was the author of the book a cynic who thought religion in Indian and the Middle East (Muslim  terrorism features too) causes more harm than good, because the TV series is giving me that vibe?

Watching Foreign Correspondent last night also did nothing to improve my image of the nation, showing how so many of the poor "migrant workers" from within the country had been completely caught off guard by the sudden, COVID-19 closures:

Tens of millions of migrant workers, who'd moved to the cities to find work, lost their jobs, their wage and their shelter overnight. To find food and shelter, hundreds of thousands hit the road to head back to their villages.

In a bid to stop the exodus of people and the virus to the countryside, governments cancelled trains and buses, and closed state borders. Many kept walking anyway, often trekking hundreds of kilometres to get home.

While the government has tried to help those in need by providing food and financial aid, not everyone has benefitted.

I think that last sentence is an understatment, if ever there was one.

Not getting it

So Spotify is getting Joe Rogan all to themselves.   I've tried listening to Rogan a couple of times, I think, but I don't see the reason for his popularity.

Mind you, I am not a fan of podcasts generally speaking.  But I still don't see why people would listen to this one in particular.

He can't wait to be old and locked away for his own safety

And hasn't Warren Mundine become an extreme Right wing pinhead?  

Starting to feel this way

He is very likeable

Haven't we reached the point where "balance" is dangerous and nonsense?

Am I the only one who has developed the feeling that a sufficiently large section of the Right has turned so far against the interests of common humanity  that media owners of the Left/centrist variety are wrong to attempt anything like "balance" by incorporating opinion by anyone who supports Trump and/or denies climate change?

Look at the Washington Post, for example.  It's editorial opinion is:

The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate'

yet it still makes room (to the outrage of every single reader, it seems) for the conservative, always Trump defending dimwit Hugh Hewitt to write:

I don’t know why they won’t confront the mountain of evidence of abuse of power. Much of Trump Derangement Syndrome (the disease that afflicts the left and the media and causes them to see evil in all that Trump does) manifests itself in “attributing motive” to opponents. It’s a cheap debating trick. They should know better, but I don’t know if they do or don’t.

But I know McCarthyism when I see it. To define anyone who uses Obamagate as either a racist or conspiracy theorist is outside the norms of acceptable American political dialogue. McCarthyism of the Left will not work outside of progressive cloisters. Obamagate is here to stay because the abuse of power is already obvious and cannot be erased.

We know Fox News has a trivial amount of "balance" in the form of Chris Wallace and (say) Neil Cavuto, and it enrages Trump to see even that, when 98% of the network's output has the same bias levels of North Korean state media.

You could say that WAPO making room for Hewitt or (equally dumb)  Marc Thiessen is the same thing - a mere token effort at being able to say they provide balance.

But it's absurd, isn't it?   There are certain topics which the media, almost at a uniform international level, agrees just do not warrant exposure in serious, mainstream outlets because to do so gives them a shine of credibility they just do not deserve - the anti vaxxer movement, for example, or Holocaust denial.    Surely the utter obvious narcissistic inanity and inability to listen to credible experts of Trump puts supporting him in the same category.  Not to mention his recent re-Tweeting some blood thirsty conspiracists of QAnon, who literally would get a thrill if it was announced that a 1,000 liberals (up to and including Trump's opponent at the last election) had been executed overnight for (imagined) child sex abuse.   

And why do people with clearly opposite opinions want to be part of the pretence of supplying "balance."    How bad does it have to get for someone like Chris Wallace to say "this is serious, I just can't stand to be in the same company as the extreme sycophants who dominate this network"?

Why can't we just say that people who want sense and decency and non-denial of science consider the Trump supporting Right has gone nuts and does not deserve a voice in sensible, mainstream media?   They can all congregate around their Fox News and Breitbart and other nonsense outlets that will pander to their dangerous lack of judgement, and those networks can kick out their token efforts at balance too.

I think things have just become too serious to continue pretending that balance is warranted.  

Internal hair

A report at Gulf News:

Cairo: A medical team at a Saudi hospital had removed 2 kilograms of hair from a woman’s stomach, ending years of pain, media reported Monday.

The woman in her 20s had long suffered from excruciating pain, the cause of which was not clear until recently.

She underwent a massive clinical examination at the King Abdul Aziz Hospital in the western Saudi city of Taif that eventually specified the source of her pain, spokesman for the city’s health department Abdul Hadi Al Rabae told Okaz newspaper.

A strange object was seen recoiling inside the abdomen and forming a strangling wall of the intestines, the official added.

“The medical team decided on an urgent intervention to reach the strange object, which was found out to be a formation of interlocked hair weighing two kgs. The mass was forming around the wall of the intestines inside the abdominal cavity and was increasingly growing in a medical rarity,” the official.

I presume it was "growing" because she was eating more hair.

This condition, called trichophagia, was discussed in detail in this article at The Conversation.

I didn't know this:

Both trichophagia and pica have been found to occur in people with iron deficiency. In some case reports of Rapunzel syndrome, hair pulling and hair eating stopped after the person was treated for iron deficiency or coeliac disease.

So, eating red meat helps some women (it's mainly found in women) avoid eating their hair.  Sorry, cows.

[And yes, I know, there are other ways to get a boost of iron in your diet.]

Just what you want in a President

Haven't noticed many people on Twitter or elsewhere saying that the timing of the start of Trump's apparent self medication with hydroxychloroquine matches up pretty closely with the Mothers Day tweetstorm that everyone recognized as extreme, even for him.  

Here's Vox writing about the drug in March:

The potential adverse side effects of hydroxychloroquine are well-documented. The drug, which is a less toxic version of chloroquine, can carry adverse psychiatric side effects that can occur even after just a single dose, though it’s more common after high doses. Those manifest differently among patients, ranging from anxiety, insomnia, and nightmares to paranoia, hallucinations, personality changes, and suicidal ideation.

In combatting malaria, doctors have accepted these potential side effects in cases where patients would otherwise die.

“The risk of psychosis is of little relevance if one is dead, the thinking goes,” Remington Nevin, an epidemiologist who specializes in drug safety, tweeted.

Some think he may be lying about taking it, but it seems to me reasonable to think his tweeting might be a sign he did indeed start on it.

In normal times, the fact that the President is taking, voluntarily and unnecessarily, a drug with potential serious effects on his mood and thinking would be something the press and his party would worry about.   But, I guess, as he was already such a fragile narcissist nut, it makes detecting the drug's effect more difficult.

The music of the spheres

Spotted this odd sounding summary of a paper at Nature:

I hope the music sounds at least a bit like John William's alien music language in Close Encounters.

So much for the "unmasking" attempt at scandal

So many (nearly all?) conspiracies owe their existence and longevity to the lack of experience in, or specialised knowledge of, a field of expertise or practice by members of the public, which is exploited by the person first creating it.

Don't know how structural steel beams perform under X degrees of heat for X amount of minutes?   Well, of course that's an area ripe for conspiratorial exploitation.

The Clinton email issue with using a private account  - as I have said before, people who have worked in Defence at nearly any but the lowest levels should all know that it is easy for an email to end up with a dubious (and unnecessarily high) security classification;  the average gullible member of the public, though, hasn't a clue and thinks if any "secret" email had been misdirected or hacked it was inevitably going to be some kind of espionage disaster. 

The latest example, if this information from a WAPO column about the pathetic attempt of Trump to make "unmasking" of Flynn a scandal against Obama and Biden is true, it would be a great example of exploitation of ignorance:

Finally, the fact that a senior official’s name appeared on the list doesn’t necessarily mean that the official actually made the request. In many cases, unmasking requests are made by a senior official’s daily intelligence briefer so they could be prepared to answer any questions the official might raise. The intelligence community nonetheless records that as a request by the senior official.

Do it

From NPR:

Republicans say they're moving ahead with plans to gather tens of thousands of people at their presidential nominating convention in North Carolina this summer — even as Democrats weigh their options for convening during the coronavirus pandemic.

What I think would be funny, kind of, is if Trump himself was fearful of turning up in person  in front of a crowded auditorium, but instead only appeared on the big screen, all as Big Brother does in 1984.  

The organisers are saying that they know there will have to be some changes due to COVID-19, including possibly attendees wearing masks.  But how many would reject that request?   

Sounds a bit of a possible PR nightmare, really.

Quick movie review - The Lighthouse

I think that, provided you go into it knowing that it has a reputation as an out there, weirdo film, it's enjoyable enough.   It looks really good, and is very atmospheric; and I can fully understand how the actors found it a difficult shoot.   (They are both really good, though.)

But it's hard to say how much one can really value a movie which has the audience rushing online afterwards to work out whether it is possible to make any sense of it.     (I haven't tried very hard.  My son told me that it's supposed to be very Freudian, and I read something about the influence of Greek myth.   Something about some painting explains one brief and particularly weird image, apparently.)

I would say the film is a bit of a cheat, though, in that the fairly early disclosure of the odd behaviour of the old dude indicates that there is likely to be an explanation coming (no matter how weird) of what he's doing up there with the light.  But there isn't.   All the sexual obsession stuff, be it of heterosexual or homoerotic nature, involving a mermaid (and, seemingly, a touch of tentacle porn) is, as far as I can tell, left without any explanation at all.   And really, there is a key sequence - perhaps the climatic one - where I think the film pushes so hard on the feeling that it ought to be making some kind of intuitive or subconscious sense, but isn't at all, that it diminishes what went before it. 

I haven't ever watched Mulholland Drive, which I think is supposed to be David Lynch's most dream like film*, but I have a vague recollection that he says he just grabs ideas from a process of meditative free association.   Eggers seems to do a far more calculated form of weirdness, where (if you care to investigate) you can see where some ideas come from.   But I wish he would do something a bit more conventional.   (I did enjoy this more than The Witch, though.)


*  perhaps I should say, except for Eraserhead, which I think is just like an outright nightmare version of fears of a young guy getting his girlfriend pregnant   

Chicken, butter, cider, apples, cream. What could go wrong?

Nothing.

I don't why I had not found this recipe before, since the name sounds pretty familiar, but I tried this version of chicken Normandy on Saturday night, and it worked very well.   It's pretty straight forward too - pretty much a one pan dish, although you take stuff out and put it back in, which means extra bowls.

I don't think I would change anything about the recipe, except that I would note that I used a "low sugar" cider, and cut up a whole chicken into 8 parts (drumstick, thigh, and the other part cut into two) so that there are smaller pieces, if you want people to pick and chose how much of the chicken to eat.  I would not buy just drumsticks to do this, as it would be hard getting them to sit far enough about the cider/onion sauce while in the oven.  A whole chicken, and the right sized pieces in the right sized pan, means you can be sure a lot of the chicken is above the liquid and develops the crisp skin that makes it nicer.

But the sauce - delicious, even if someone (like my daughter) is weirdly fussy about eating fruits with meat.   She just avoided the apples (I used Pink Lady) and had the sauce.  Steamed potatoes and sautéed brussels sprouts were the vegetables, if you were wondering.

All about the disturbing world of QAnon

An excellent long read at The Atlantic about QAnon makes the case for it being a new religion in the process of creation.   I thought that maybe exaggeration, but I actually haven't read that much analysis of it as a movement before, and perhaps didn't realise the intense religiosity of many of its followers, and the similarity to other religious movements which were not killed off by the failure of predictions. 

It also makes the point I keep noting about the unforeseen harm the internet would create:

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

The article makes it clear how one of the perverse ways the QAnon movement works is that it encourages people to "do their own research", which gives devotees the thrill of participating in building up the framework of a public conspiracy belief system.   And the feeling (that at least some followers have) that it "must" be true because God would not let them get deceived in this way is clear:

In Toledo, I asked Shock if she had any theories about Q’s identity. She answered immediately: “I think it’s Trump.” I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said. But she also wanted me to know that her obsession with Q wasn’t about Trump. This had been something she was reluctant to speak about at first. Now, she said, “I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this direction. I feel like if it was deceitful, in my spirit, God would be telling me, ‘Enough’s enough.’ But I don’t feel that. I pray about it. I’ve said, ‘Father, should I be wasting my time on this?’ … And I don’t feel that feeling of I should stop.”

And once you buy into this way of thinking, everything can be made to fit into it:

Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”

 And another example:

 Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.

 If only my conspiracy obsessed mastermind commenter could recognize how he has fallen into the same trap.   But they get too invested to ever come back out.  

What is freaking disturbing is when you have a President encouraging this dangerous movement that is, at heart, against the basic principles that you need people to adhere to have a sound government.   (It's also full of thirst for bloody revenge for purely imagined crimes - making it like a malignant version of Christianity that can no longer wait for God to do the accounting.)

If the Republicans, and the mainstream media, had any sense, they would be daily expressing dismay that Trump is not fit for office unless he disowns the QAnon movement.

I'm getting a Buddhist headache

Inspired by my last post, referencing animal suffering, I googled the question "what does Buddhist say about animal suffering?" which led to this lengthy post at the ABC Religion and Ethics website:  Buddhism and moral status of animals. 

It has given me the urge to make a few comments about this religion:

*  it annoys me how I don't enough even know how to pronounce many of the words for the different branches of the religion and some of the concepts, as this makes it harder for my tiny brain to remember after anything other than the shortest reading break what many of the different terms mean.   

*  I know it is indisputable that Christianity has undergone a massive amount of splintering over interpretation of it foundational scriptures and theology, but I think Buddhism, with the added complication of undergoing a large amount of syncretism as it moved into different regions, is even worse. 

*  Moral reasoning within the Christian faith - or any faith really - is simplified somewhat by having the concept of an ongoing entity (a discrete human soul, or resurrected body) that is going to be around to carry the consequences of its actions.   The arguments within Buddhism over moral action are undoubtedly more complicated by the "no self" idea.  Take these paragraphs  from the above article, for example:

Most agree, however, that the Buddha denies that there is an essential self that persists through time and that underlies all our changing physical and psychological properties. This idea might lend support to the following argument: Egoistic self-interest presupposes that there is a self whose interests should be privileged over others with respect to moral consideration. This presupposition is mistaken; there is no self that could be privileged in this way. Psychological states exist but no selves who own those states. If suffering should be removed, given some interest, then all sufferings should be removed, given some interest. Killing and harming animals causes them to suffer. Animals have an interest not to suffer. So, we should not kill or harm animals.

Versions of the no-self equality argument can be found throughout the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition. A famous version appears in Chapter 8 of Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra. It is susceptible to objection, however. One might, for instance, challenge the premise that psychological states exist but no selves who own those states. Paul Williams argues that it does not make sense to speak of free-floating concerns, cares and sufferings without a subject undergoing those states. This is a subtle issue. The premise is making a metaphysical claim ― there is no ontological entity, self, that stands in an ownership relation to psychological events. This is different to the phenomenological claim that psychological events, ordinarily and constitutively, involve the subjective experiencing of their own content. Both claims as well as their consistency are accepted by leading proponents of Yogācāra and Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Madhyamaka Buddhism.

 It has the lot - long, unfamiliar words which won't stick in my memory easily; metaphysics which are complicated and not intuitive;  conflict between different schools of thought. 

As I say, it gives me a bit of a headache, really...

A pointless early death (times 10 million)

NPR reports, about the pig meat industry in the USA [my bold]: 

Millions Of Pigs Will Be Euthanized As Pandemic Cripples Meatpacking Plants 

Jason Lusk, the head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University, estimates that there is currently a 40 percent reduction in meat processing capacity, which will lead to 200,000 pigs per day being left on their farms.

"That's a million extra pigs that would have gone to market, but instead are staying on the farm, from just one week," Lusk said.

Hogs ready for slaughter cannot be easily held on farms because of their fast rate of growth. Pigs that are held much longer than six months after birth grow too large for processing, and meat processing plants typically won't accept hogs larger than 300 pounds.

"Nationwide, as an industry, we're thinking right now, given what we know, somewhere between five and ten million" hogs for euthanization, said Leman, a farmer from Eureka, Ill., and a board member of the Illinois Pork Producers Association.

Before the Coronavirus crisis, pork production was a finely-tuned, just-in-time supply chain. During normal times, this led to efficiency and the reduction of the cost to produce pork. Now, it is a significant burden to hog farmers who will have nowhere to sell their ready-for-market pigs.

I guess from an individual pig's point of view, it matters little whether they are being killed to be eaten, or be buried in a pit, all at the young age of 6 months.  (Apparently, left alone, they will live 15 to 20 years.)

But from a broader point of view, where a humane person's preference is that, by and large, it's good to let semi-sentient creatures live out their life if they are doing me (or other semi-sentient creatures) no substantial harm,  this completely ruins the justification for having helped create more of them in the first place.   (The justification being that we are all part of a natural order in which living creatures find good sustenance from eating other living creatures, and hence we are entitled to humanely raise and kill some, and not be wasteful about it either.)

I eat meat, but I do feel worse about farming and slaughter as I get older.   

An excellent summary of the journalistic problem on reporting on Trump

Greg Sargent's column at WAPO re-visiting the problem with the mainstream media's political reporting on Trump and Republicans is really good:

The latest developments in the Michael Flynn case should prompt us to revisit one of the most glaring failures in political journalism, one that lends credibility to baseless narratives pushed for purely instrumental purposes, perversely rewarding bad-faith actors in the process.

News accounts constantly claim with no basis that new information “boosts” or “lends ammunition” to a particular political attack, or “raises new questions” about its target. These journalistic conventions are so all-pervasive that we barely notice them.

But they’re extremely pernicious, and they need to stop. They both reflect and grotesquely amplify a tendency that badly misleads readers. That happened widely in 2016, to President Trump’s great benefit. It’s now happening again....

....news accounts are reporting on this [the Republicans trying to make the "unmasking" issue into a scandal] in purportedly objective ways that subtly place an editorial thumb on the scale in favor of those attacks.

For instance, the Associated Press ran this headline: “Flynn case boosts Trump’s bid to undo Russia probe narrative.” Axios told us:

Biden’s presence on the list could turn it into an election year issue, though the document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing.

CNN informed us that this is “the latest salvo to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation and accuse the previous administration of wrongdoing.”

But here’s the problem: These formulations do not constitute a neutral transmission of information, even though they are supposed to come across that way.

The new information actually does not “boost” Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation or “discredit” it. And if there is “no evidence of wrongdoing,” then it cannot legitimately be “turned into an election issue.”

There’s no way to neutrally assert that new info “boosts” an attack or constitutes a “salvo” or is “becoming an issue.” The information is being used in a fashion that is either legitimate or not, based on the known facts. Such pronouncements in a from-on-high tone of journalistic objectivity lend the dishonest weaponizing of new info an aura of credibility.

Referring back to how this happened with Hillary Clinton:

When critics say Clinton was unfairly placed on an equivalent plane to Trump in this regard, journalists defensively point out that Democrats must be scrutinized, too. But this misses the objection, which centers not on a demand for light scrutiny of Democrats, but on a criticism of presentation and proportionality, and the ways in which getting that lopsidedly wrong misinforms in a larger and more intangible sense.

In today's bit of Buddhist trivia

I found this in a International Committee of the Red Cross paper, about how Buddhists cope with COVID-19 (my bold):

Very early in the history of Buddhism, short verses were recommended by the Buddha to provide protection from certain afflictions, and these formal paritta (pirit in Sri Lanka) recitations of sacred texts are still regarded as having the power to heal, protect and ward off danger.

All-night paritta recitations by monks are deemed particularly effective, and the Sri Lankan Mahavamsa contains the earliest historical reference to this practice, describing how Upatissa I of Anuradhapura instructed monks to recite the Ratana Sutta through the night when Sri Lanka was afflicted by plague and disease.  This practice continues in Theravada Buddhist contexts, and during the Covid-19 crisis senior Buddhist monks in Myanmar also performed mid-air recitations of parittas on a special aircraft flying above the country to ward off the outbreak.

Now, I'm not at all against the principle of praying per se, but this apparent idea that flying above the country while praying sets up something like a protective force field against disease seems a slightly funny (and slightly delightful) amalgam of science and the supernatural to me.  All a bit Dr Strange, perhaps. 

Another Catallaxy situation

Steve Kates has been on another bender of Trump worship at Catallaxy recently, re-printing large numbers of comments from The Australian in support of his orange demigod after Troy Bramston dared write a highly critical piece.    

"So, what else is new?" you may ask.

Today, Kates goes into full blown wingnut conspiracy in a post in which he explains that the COVID-19 lockdowns are only about the e-vil Left trying to defeat Trump in the Presidential election.   Nonsensically, he also notes that a  lot of deaths have happened in nursing homes in strongly Democrat States, due to deliberate policies of allowing (or requiring) the residents to return to them after hospital admissions for COVID 19 treatment. The intention was, according to Kates, to increase deaths in those States.

Killing off frail nursing home residents in an already solidly Democrat State might seem, to someone not caught up in a bubble world of wingnut conspiracy, a strange way for those Democrat leaders to try influence voters in their favour.

Or as someone in comments says:

I don't understand the terms on which Sinclair gives posting rights to his blog, but it would seem to be on some sort of permanent basis regardless of the quality of content and the paranoia of the poster.  

Free speech for his nutty mates does mean, at least, that he continues to have his own reputation tarred by his own blog.  That's the good part.

Facilitating the import of the American paranoid/conspiracy style on politics in Australia - that's the bad part.    

Made me laugh

Some people seem to have an active dislike for the humour attempts of the Borowitz Report at the New Yorker.  But sometimes, it really hits the spot:

Rand Paul Says Secret to Social Distancing Is Making Everyone Despise You

Update:  I also like this headline from The Onion -

The contradictions of not-so-gay Poland

A few weeks ago, Foreign Correspondent had an interesting story on Poland, which has a real culture warring Right wing government (in cahoots with particularly Right wing leadership in the Catholic Church), and one of the biggest targets of both is homosexuality.   It was a balanced take, though, and included a town mayor who was openly gay and said that he managed to get on with his life with no problems.   However, you still have several districts which make declarations that they are "LGBT free" zones, and stuff like this:

Poland is preparing to vote on a new law that would criminalise sex education and denounce those who teach it as paedophiles and LGBT+ activists.

so it's hardly a happy place for many gay folk, that mayor notwithstanding.

It's with that background that I was surprised to read in this article, on the mixed way formerly Communist Europe used to legally deal with homosexual activity, that Poland has long been, at least in a technical, criminalisation sense, liberal on the matter [my bold]:

 Poland presented the strongest divergence from the Soviet model. Same-sex acts continued to be formally criminalized in the country after the First World War, when the penal codes of the former occupants (Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary) remained in power. They mostly criminalized male same-sex acts, though the Austrian code included broader provisions against so-called ‘same-sex fornication’ and was indeed also used against women. The new Polish penal code of 1932, however, decriminalized consensual same-sex acts, and they have not been recriminalized since. This new law simply reflected the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which had been used as a model for the 1808 law of the Duchy of Warsaw, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807 from the Polish lands ceded by Prussia. It was also influenced by the prominent Polish sociologists of that time, Antoni Mikulski and Leon Wachholz, who promoted the interpretation of homosexuality as innate. Interestingly, many Western countries – usually perceived as more progressive than Central and Eastern European countries – were lagging behind Poland with respect to the legal status of homosexuality. Denmark, for example, decriminalized same-sex acts in 1933, Sweden in 1944, England in 1967, Canada in 1969, West Germany in 1969, Austria in 1971, Finland in 1971, Norway in 1972, Ireland in 1993 and the United States, often considered as the prototype of the West, fully decriminalized homosexuality only in 2003, more than seventy years after Poland did so.

I would not have guessed that the country would have been under the influence of sociologists at that time.

So there's quite the disjunct between criminal law and culture acceptance in that country.  I suppose you could say the same of Asian countries such as Japan, where Wikipedia tells me:

Same-sex sexual activity was criminalised only briefly in Japan's history between 1872 and 1880, after which a localised version of the Napoleonic Penal Code was adopted with an equal age of consent.^[2]

yet it is only recently that gay people have started to be open about it on the media, and to their families.

Anyway, back to Poland:  the Foreign Correspondent story also noted that there had been a very large scale scandal of Catholic clerical child abuse revealed there not so long ago, very similar to the story elsewhere.  (Offending priests moved instead of prosecuted, etc.)   Again, it is hard to see how this will not erode the Church's authority on its teaching on sexuality.   Not sure how the right wing government got elected, though...

Can some journalist point this out to Trump?

One of Trump's back up plans for finding an excuse for [possibly, hopefully, and I think likely] losing the November election is to blame it on Democrats providing for voting by mail:

Yet in California, the Republicans just won back a seat (traditionally theirs anyway, so no one is in a great panic about it) in which it seems likely that perhaps 50% of the votes were by mail:

In 2018, in California as a whole, 43 percent of the votes ultimately cast were not in the morning-after tabulations, and the proportion of mail ballots in this special election (for which all registered voters were sent a mail ballot due to an executive order from Governor Gavin Newsom) could be even higher.

He shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.   Even though he is a moron and there is no way to get him to make sense.

A bit late to the historical Korean zombie party

I like my zombies in small doses, and hence have no interest is something as protracted as The Walking Dead (ten series, seriously?), but I did start watching with my son the 2 series (but short - 6 episodes each) of Kingdom, in which zombies run amuck in ye olde Korea.

It's pretty entertaining, and a significant part of the fun is the odd (to Western eyes) costuming - particularly the hats.  The royal guards' two feathered ones look particularly flamboyant:

As I suspected, the hats have attracted some internet posts about whether they are accurate or not, and it would seem the answer is pretty much "yes".

Cool.

What a disgraceful moron

Isn't it remarkable that Republicans and conservatives support a President who defames a vocal critic by promoting a groundless, nutty conspiracy theory that he's a murderer?   Where's the common decency on the Right gone?  

The modern world

Brisbane's autumn skies are often clear and really good for early evening satellite spotting.

As I left work a couple of nights ago, I looked up to see what I could see with the good view I had to the west, and saw what looked like a pretty bright satellite moving in such a way that I thought there was a good chance it was the International Space station.   I turned on my phone and said "OK Google, ISS sightings for Brisbane Australia", and in a flash, information from a NASA website showed it was indeed the space station.

This is the undeniably cool side of near instantaneous information from the internet.

I am not sure that it makes up for the creation of a self supporting community of idiocy that the internet also enables.  It should, but gee at times I have my doubts.

I was mistaken

At first I thought this might have been Tony Abbott confessing as to what Peta Credlin had forced him to do:

but I was mistaken.